


As the Crow Flies

by BC_Brynn



Series: Trust Your Nose [12]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Caring!Kisame, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 17:15:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20295109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BC_Brynn/pseuds/BC_Brynn
Summary: The sweetest thing in a nukenin’s life is blood.The softest is a fellow mass-murderer’s compassion.





	As the Crow Flies

**Author's Note:**

> This happens during chapters thirty and thirty-one of _Keep the Wolves from the Gates_.
> 
> (Warnings are in the end note.)

Itachi stayed out of reach of the explosions easily – they were heralded with sound and bursts of chakra more than a second in advance, and that was an almost leisurely game of keep-away, in Itachi’s opinion.

Until, of course, the mark did something clever, and Itachi found himself boxed in between a rock wall, two explosions and the Iwa nin himself.

He overestimated himself. Or, rather, he estimated his own skills correctly, but his body failed him in that crucial instance.

He breathed in smoke. It felt like his ribcage was being abraded from the inside.

A wave of water crashed from above onto where the enemy had just been standing, missing Itachi by a foot.

“He’s a brat,” Kisame muttered with distaste, finishing the seals for his next _landscaping_ Suiton technique.

“An-nother braughhh…?” Itachi attempted to snark, but the need to cough overwhelmed him. He body-flickered.

There was another explosion, another thunderous crash of a wave.

He heard Kisame saying something along the lines of ‘you were never like this’, which, while accurate, did not have any significant bearing on the situation.

Itachi coughed again. He pressed his mouth shut forcefully, teeth clenched, and made himself swallow the blood, upset stomach later on be damned. He felt wetness on his upper lip.

A nosebleed.

The Iwa shinobi – whom they were supposed to capture alive and without permanent damage – swore so loudly and foully that even Kisame grimaced in distaste.

Itachi, pithily, found himself mostly agreeing with his enemy’s invective.

He wiped the blood from his nose and mouth into the sleeve of his cloak, like another red cloud on the black background. It went with the theme, because apparently a uniform was required for their criminal organisation. Perhaps Naoki-sensei _was_ right, and you truly _could_ recognise a megalomaniac by their fashion-consciousness-

“That’s fucking art, yeah!” screeched the deranged Iwa nin, just as the ground shook and the night sky lit up yellow.

“I’m beginning to see his merits,” admitted Kisame. “Thought this would be easier.”

If Itachi could breathe, he would body-flicker in front of the boy and catch him in a Tsukuyomi. Mission accomplished.

However, unless his lungs would miraculously clear up within the next minute, he feared it would be up to Kisame to drain their would-be recruit’s chakra to exhaustion. Or, alternatively, bash the boy against a rock very hard and hope that his brains would not end up too scrambled.

“Don’t move-” Kisame muttered.

Itachi froze. He felt the impulse to cough rise in him and, try as he might to suppress it, he knew that within a moment it would wrack him-

Kisame’s jutsu hit him from behind like a punch to the spine. He managed to keep his footing, but it bent him in half, and blood came rushing out of his mouth and nose at the same time. His Sharingan activated spontaneously-

Kisame’s arm pulled Itachi upright, steadied him as he breathed in-

He was dragged in a tandem Shunshin as he exhaled-

He landed (inhaling almost easily) straight in front of the Iwa nin, whose only visible eye widened in shock. “Wha-”

“_Tsukuyomi_,” Itachi non-replied to the incomplete question.

He felt his Sharingan spinning, his motions and the flex of chakra more an instinct than anything he consciously chose to do, and then both he and the target were sinking, not into an elaborate, artificial scene of torture and carnage, but into a memory.

Itachi thought in the first instance that it was the memory of his Clan’s death-

But, no. He had, in fact, murdered his way through other houses in other villages since then. This one used to belong to a noble from the Iron Country, a man too ambitious for either his own skills, or those of his guard.

Itachi and Kisame – for by then they had already been assigned by Leader to form a partnership – easily slaughtered dozens of people. Itachi didn’t think twice about it then, but now, looking at the memory, he wondered whether Sasuke would have been impressed or horrified. He was unsure which of the reactions would have been worse.

Were Sasuke horrified, that would mean even the cruelty of Itachi’s actions hadn’t broken him. Were he impressed, it would make him that much more likely to survive.

And then, instead of waking up from the jutsu into reality, Itachi lost consciousness.

x

Itachi came to with dawnlight in his eyes.

The sensations were unfamiliar – he was resting semi-comfortably on something that made rhythmical motions – and it took him far too long to realise that he was being princess-carried.

This had never happened to him before. When previous teammates needed to transport his unconscious body (or, on one memorable occasion, his conscious body with a comminuted fracture of the femur) they had just thrown it over their shoulders.

To Kisame’s credit, Itachi would have probably drowned if carried in that position tonight.

“Y’can…” Itachi scowled and swallowed, but that didn’t do much to get rid of the fusty feeling in his mouth. He tried to speak again. “You can let me down.”

Kisame shrugged. “You weigh less than a bag of groceries.”

That was a slight exaggeration, but Itachi knew that he, in fact, weighed far less than Samehada. That was not the source of his anxiousness. He was not concerned that Kisame would drop him. He was not concerned that Kisame would exhaust himself, either – the man could make his own decisions.

Itachi could not quite put into words what it was that made him reflexively wish to be put down. To gain some distance form his partner, perhaps? He was not in any more pain than what was lately his baseline; there was no definable discomfort, and yet he couldn’t help but feel out of sorts.

“Sometimes I wish you’d stop,” Kisame admitted quietly, taking long, measured steps down the road. “But I understand the desire to go out fighting.”

“To the bitter end,” Itachi acknowledged, half-smiling. It was one of life’s little jokes that blood tasted sweet, and thus Itachi was probably going to die literally _drowning in sweetness_.

This felt – oddly fair. Ever since he learnt about the illness, Itachi had considered it his due.

It felt like everything he had done was festering within him, eating him from the inside out. How poetic. Truly a fate fitting for a monster like him.

“The mission?” he inquired.

“Success,” Kisame reported succinctly. “One of Leader’s avatars took the target back to base…”

_For conversion_, Kisame didn’t finish. Itachi wondered how much work there would be left after the Tsukuyomi. He had not been entirely conscious of what he was doing. He had, frankly, not been in control of the jutsu, using it on reflex when Kisame created the opportunity for him…

Which reminded him of the unusual quality of his current respiration. “Why am I breathing so easily?”

Kisame had said he was no good at healing, and Itachi doubted that a friendly iryounin had passed by and offered to help (or even conceded to helping under threat) some outlaws while Itachi was unconscious.

Kisame shrugged again. “Blood may be thicker than water, but I’m good enough at Suiton to work with it.”

It was the single most awe-inspiring sentence Kisame had ever uttered in Itachi’s presence – what else could he do with blood if he chose to? rip it out of live humans in streams? stop it from circulating? – but also one of the most mesmerising.

“You’re looking at me like that again.”

“There is a lot of fascinating scenery to watch instead,” Itachi deadpanned, somewhat surprised that Kisame was bothered by mere scrutiny. Admittedly, Itachi was entirely too focused on contemplating the ramifications of using Suiton jutsu to affect the water in people’s bodies.

Could you go down to cellular level?

Or, going for raw force instead of precise control, any sufficiently overpowered Suiton technique could drain enemies of the water content of their bodies, leaving behind but desiccated corpses. Was Kisame aware of this? _Could_ he _do_ it? With his chakra reserves, he might have been able to turn platoons into dust without raising Samehada.

Kisame dismissed Itachi’s dissembling with the aplomb of a partner of years. “Do you ever take a break from insincerity? The most genuine thing about you is the dying.” He looked at Itachi’s face for a moment, then closed his eyes, and added: “And the wonder.”

“…wonder?” Itachi repeated mildly. He had thought he mostly treated Kisame with dispassion, and this – _honest_ – dispassion was a part of why Kisame came to respect him.

“You have no idea _how_ you look at me, do you?” Kisame asked with a momentary grin that died a swift death. “Makes _me_ wonder what kind of people you grew up around, if somebody like me giving half a fuck about you stumps you so much.”

Excusing the vernacular, Itachi did not think ‘half a fuck’ was an accurate assessment. Kisame had taken it upon himself to care for Itachi far beyond the lines of duty, or even loyalty to teammates (Itachi had had a team once, a good team – ANBU had its positives – so he knew how far team loyalty stretched). Kisame probably believed that Itachi spent his ‘vacations’ recovering from increasingly more severe bouts of his illness, but even that should not have made him decide to _cover_ for Itachi. Just because he could.

Maybe it was because Kisame had met him when Itachi was thirteen: a widely feared mass-murdering child. Which put Kisame’s death-threat of a greeting upon their first meeting into perspective.

Itachi smiled.

“Yeah,” Kisame muttered. “Sometimes killing a lot of people is a solution. When Zabuza slaughtered a whole batch of future gennin it sure made people re-think the kiddie death matches.”

There was an implied question about the Uchiha Clan in there, but Itachi was not certain he had an answer.

He thought his Mother had probably shown him kindness, but that would have been a very long time ago, at an age that he could not remember clearly (except for the battlefields of the Third Shinobi War – his too-early awakened Sharingan never let him forget those). Once Itachi had the Sharingan, there was training. A lot of training. And, sadly, he had shown great discipline and aptitude, which resulted in additional training.

The next memory he had of _family_ was a newborn Sasuke.

Nine of Itachi’s twenty years were filled with duty to the Clan and duty to the village; duty to his little brother had come as a much-needed reprieve at several points when Itachi was a single stressful event away from stepping into the path of an enemy’s jutsu.

He preferred to think of that part of his life as if it had happened to someone else.

He had thought he was choosing the lesser evil. That with every death he brought about he was buying hundred lives. Now, in hindsight, years later, with better training in critical thinking and miles of distance from the situation, he knew what he _should_ have done.

“An effective solution is not necessarily a good one,” Itachi admitted.

Kisame laughed. “Show me a good thing in the world – and I will show you the lie in it.”

_What is the lie in you_? Itachi thought. But he decided he did not want to know. He preferred to suspend his disbelief in the face of the extremely rare good things.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: canon-typical violence, sadness, terminal illness, discussion of death, referenced mass-murder and character death, referenced brainwashing, referenced child abuse (srsly it’s about Itachi - you know what to expect)


End file.
